Do You Do The Limbo?

As one raised a Catholic (a veneer that moulted over the years) I was shocked, shocked, to read this week that the Pope wants to hold that limbus at least at limb's length. Standard Catholic, and even broader Christian, tradition holds that baptism is required for admission to heaven. Evidently the Church(es) has taken the “must be born again of the spirit” stuff seriously. Ever since Augustine condemned the unbaptized to hell in the 5th century theologians and their administrative overseers have wrestled with the idea of a merciful God sending the innocent babes to eternal damnation. So the Vatican invented Limbo: not hell, not purgatory, not heaven, but a peanut gallery just outside the pearly gates where the unwashed, I mean, unbaptized (infants only? How about 8-year olds?) can bask in the holy glow and pick up the crumbs that fall their way. Limbo was sort of an unwanted orphan, accompanied as it was with baptism by desire and baptism by blood. Supposedly one who had never heard the Good News might still somehow know about and desire the one-and-only's grace and redemption. Do you suppose that after death people still grow older? Younger? Will infants learn to speak? In Esperanto? Apparently, while I wasn't paying attention (most of the past 40 years), the Catholics closeted limbo in the '90's (i.e., the 1990's). It was never a reputable idea, having no biblical reference. But it was soothing for all those believers who wanted their god to be a just and merciful one. Given the fascistic trends in contemporary capitalistic countries (of which both the current and previous Popes have been staunch supporters) some may fear that, pace Augustine, these innocents may once again be consigned to hell. A consulted theologian held open the possibility of their being saved as we don't seem to have enough information to form firm conclusions. This is a step in the right direction though it might put preachers in a bind. No word if such a change would be retroactive. But since these innocents have never returned to tell us what limbo is like, or even sent us picture postcards, it's not likely we'll ever hear about their having been swept out of the Light into the Darkness. Personally, I'm all for the reincarnation of paganism. Christianity grew as a city religion and having taken over the one-and-only jealous Jehovah from the Jews they took off into the countryside, the pagus of the Romans, and worked tirelessly and creatively to crush the idols and the beliefs of those bumpkins. And for about two millenia it almost looked like a good idea. “I am Who am” gave his followers dominion over the whole world - at least planet earth – to do with what they wished with an injunction to be fruitful and multiply. Now, in the 21st century the Ice Cap is melting, the climate is changing, the air and waters are polluted, we're so puffed up on antibiotics that we're one pandemic away from decimation, the oil is running out, wars are increasing, global warming is waxing, et cetera. Many, including Gibbon in his Delcine and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote that people get the gods that suit their temperament. Monotheism has had a nice run. It certainly was a unifying (dominating) force for development. But it's time for a change. O Tempora, O Mores. Paganism's virtues included its ability to deal with misfortune and evil. Pagans had many, many gods: some good, some bad, some jestful, some wicked, and since they were tied to natural phenomena it was easy for different cultures to incorporate another's gods into their own pantheon. In those days people didn't have to confuse their material greed in a coating of war theology, as in the Crusades of the Middle Ages or the modern Crusade of Bush and his ideologues. Arising in nature these beliefs caused people to pay attention to their natural environment. Not that the ancients were environmentalists. Not at all. Lacking knowledge and analytical skills and tools they were even more destructive than moderns. That is why they moved about so much and founded so many colonies: Soil turned infertile? Move along. Need another forest? Move along. There were no noble savages; there was no Garden of Eden. Today we know the consequences of our behaviors. The days of selfishness, of unbridled egotism and greed no longer sustain us or help us develop. Time for the new paradigm. In terms of political economy, this fits in well with Karl Marx and the need for class-based socialism. But we need a new religion, a new opium of the people, unlike today where the opiates are the religion of the people. Do you suppose that bumper crop in Afghanistan lowered the price of Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin? In general, Pagans had the good sense not to develop a theology. In primitive tribes there was a belief in a Creator but noone claimed to know what this Creator was like and they doubted this “being” even had any interest in human affairs. This interest, and meddling, was left to the lesser gods (Zeus, Minerva, et al.) who were not the Creator and were not really immortal. It took a Semitic tribe to conjure up an all-powerful being interested in human affairs, and the rest truly is history. Aquinas, the “dumb ox” (though a very clever one), was the first Intelligent Design propagandist. I didn't find St. Thomas convincing 40 years ago, but he was more sophisticated than his contemporary clones. The news article regarding Limbo quoted an unnamed theologian: “God wants us to go to heaven.” That is the nub of the problem. Want means lack, or need, and an immortal, omnipotent and omniscient creature cannot by definition want anything. A God who wants is only a god, otherwise known as an alien tyrant (or an occasionally useful figment of the imagination). Even those early primitives were smart enough to know that. Or, in Wittgenstein's terms: Whereof one does not know, thereof one cannot speak. But speaking from ignorance was useful and served power and today's millenarians are loony enough to hope for thermonuclear war to bring about that second coming. These people, with their money and support for fascism are much more dangerous than the statistical fluke of a mass murderer in Virginia. So I'd say we need a religious renascence, one based on nature worship, respect for the world that nurtures us and our compatriots who share our burdens (billionaires need not apply; they can be our apostates, the anathemata). Some decades back James Lovelock tried that with the Gaia hypothesis: the idea that the earth itself is a living, sentient being. Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem as the Judaic-Christian-Islamic tradition: it attempts to describe the indescribable with some pretty far-fetched ideas. Fancy fictions are fine but not to be taken seriously. Ecology is a science; theology is mental masturbation and is never a liberating exercise. As there are no atheists in foxholes (my favorite prayer was always: Lord, save us from Christians!) we all wonder, at times, how all this came about and what it all means. But this doesn't require us to “accept Jesus into our hearts” or require us to kneel facing Mecca. More to the point, our bowing to the ineffable doesn't require us to proselytize others. The new counterinsurgency manual of the US Army claims that they, the soldiers, fight for the free enterprise system. That is a part of our theology we need to suppress. Suppose the Iraqis want to continue with a state-owned oil industry. Whose country is Iraq? Does it exist only to sate the insatiable greed of western capitalists? That we are all born into this “vale of tears” and need to work (most of us) to meet our needs is the reality. That it is caused by Original Sin and that because two individuals screwed up billions and billions of their progeny need to be saved (often at the point of a bayonet) is not merely fiction, it's perverse. Even pagans learned not to punish children for the sins of the fathers. In a highly rationalized world - officially at least – we're unlikely ever to recapture the awe of believing in alien beings who control our fates or who have a personal interest in our behaviors. But we have the modern equivalent: statistics! Einstein couldn't believe that God plays dice with the universe. Tell that to a meteorologist! Reports from a few centuries ago related that Indians of northern North America had a word in their language – rendered “Edthin” by the investigator – for the Aurora Borealis. The word means “deer” because their experience was that a hairy deer hide rubbed vigorously by hand on a dark night produced sparks. Some might call that poetic; I call it astute. What we need is a new paganism that brings the sky down to earth, that integrates the mysterious with the rational, that allows us to develop tools and techniques that serve and enhance our lives and prepare us for the future. What we can no longer live with is a jealous, vindictive god that requires us to convert the heathens and to bring the free enterprise system to the unwashed masses.